Multiplicities of charged pions and unidentified charged hadrons from deep-inelastic scattering of muons off an isoscalar target

TL;DR

This paper reports measurements of charged pion and unidentified hadron multiplicities from deep-inelastic muon scattering on an isoscalar target, covering a broad kinematic range, and uses the data to extract quark fragmentation functions via leading-order pQCD analysis.

Contribution

It provides new experimental multiplicity data in a wide kinematic domain and performs a leading-order pQCD analysis to extract quark fragmentation functions.

Findings

Measured multiplicities across various x, y, z bins.

Covered a broad Q^2 range > 1 GeV^2.

Extracted quark fragmentation functions from data.

Abstract

Multiplicities of charged pions and unidentified hadrons produced in deep-inelastic scattering were measured in bins of the Bjorken scaling variable $x$, the relative virtual-photon energy $y$ and the relative hadron energy $z$. Data were obtained by the COMPASS Collaboration using a 160 GeV muon beam and an isoscalar target ($^6$LiD). They cover the kinematic domain in the photon virtuality $Q^2$ > 1(GeV/c$)^2$, $0.004 < x < 0.4$, $0.2 < z < 0.85$ and $0.1 < y < 0.7$. In addition, a leading-order pQCD analysis was performed using the pion multiplicity results to extract quark fragmentation functions.